Artist Database

JARVIS, Lucy

Born

Toronto, Ontario, 1896

Died

Pembroke Dyke, Nova Scotia, 1985

Biography synopsis

Lucy Mary Hope Jarvis painted children's portraits, landscapes and figure studies in oil and watercolour. She was an art instructor at Kings Hall in Compton, Quebec, a cataloguer and draftsman for the Royal Ontario Museum, operated a rural circuit for the National Film Board from 1942-44, and was an Art Instructor at Provincial Normal School in Fredericton, New Brunswick from 1944-46. She also held the position of Director of the Art Department at the University of New Brunswick in 1946 to 1960. Her work has been exhibited in solo shows in Brantford, Ontario, Fredericton, New Brunswick, and in 1979 at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Fredericton, New Brunswick. She also participated in exhibitions in Sackville, New Brunswick, the Canadian National Exhibition, Graphic Arts Toronto, at the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in 1930 and 1931, the National Gallery of Canada, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts Spring Exhibition in 1932, and at the New Brunswick Museum. Lucy Jarvis, along with Pegi Nicol MacLeod, started the Observatory Art Centre at the University of New Brunswick. In 1962 Jarvis traveled to Europe to study with funding from a Canada Council grant and from friends at the University of New Brunswick. She spent a year in the '30s painting in a Nova Scotian fishing village, and would later return to Nova Scotia in 1961 to establish a studio in Pembroke Dyke, near Yarmouth.

Niergarth, Kirk. ""What Would He Have Us Do?" Gender and the "Profession" of Artist in New Brunswick in the 1930s and 1940s" Rethinking Professionalism. Ed. Kristina Huneault and Janice Anderson Montreal: McGill-Queens Press, 2012.